Sign in

A Bowl of Deadly Soup Gone Dry

When I was a kid, a wedding banquet meant eating shark fin soup. Somebody got married—boom—and there we were, sucking down the stringy soup at an elaborate eight-course affair in New York’s Chinatown. It was pleasing, in the salty, gelatin-thickened way of Thanksgiving gravy, but it was in no way wildly delicious. Shark fin itself is virtually tasteless—as Jonathan Gold, the food critic, once put it, the flavor is “bland to the point of nonexistence.” We ate it because everyone else did, and everyone else ate it for the same reason.

In China, shark fin soup has been a staple banquet dish of the aristocracy since the Ming Dynasty, which began in 1368. It fell out of favor after the 1949 Communist Revolution, but surged back to popularity with wealthy elites in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. A decade and a half ago, the market for shark fin shifted back to mainland China, where a new middle class suddenly found itself able to afford a delicacy once enjoyed by a privileged few.

Hong Kong is now the global trade hub for shark fin, handling about half the world’s imports; it sends most of them on to China. Buried in the annual avalanche of trade figures released at the end of 2012 by Hong Kong’s Census and Statistics Department was an intriguing number: three thousand, one hundred metric tons, the amount of shark fin imported last year (excluding December). It marked a surprisingly precipitous drop from the ten thousand, three hundred metric tons of shark fin imported in 2011. (A catty of shark fin, a common measurement in Hong Kong markets which amounts to just over one pound, makes ten servings of soup.) Local news outlets and activists took notice, pointing to this figure as tangible evidence that ongoing campaigns to stem shark fin consumption in mainland China are working.

But the import data may not reveal as much about dropping demand for shark fin as it initially implies. Tracy Tsang, a senior shark program officer at World Wildlife Fund-Hong Kong, suggested that a coding error at Hong Kong’s Census and Statistics Department is a possible explanation for the precipitous drop in imports. Nearly all the customs codes for imports had changed for 2012, she told me, so, despite the “sexy” number, “it’s unfair to say that the figures show the ‘real picture’ for shark fin imports.” The Census and Statistics Department confirmed that there have been some coding changes, and a look at the records indicates that a large portion of the shark trade may have been reclassified. (Some portion of the fin trade is now likely lumped in with shark meat and not broken out as fin-specific products.) Shelley Clarke, a fisheries scientist who authored the first systematic study of the shark fin trade in 2000, points to another possibility: shark fin trade figures have been closely correlated with shark landings for the last 15 years. Falling trade numbers, she said, may simply reflect fewer sharks left in the sea. And shark fin trade figures have always been inherently murky. There are no annual records, for example, on how many sharks are killed globally for their fins, or how many are dumped back into the sea.

Like whales and dolphins, sharks are slow-growing large ocean animals whose ongoing depletion has huge, cascading effects on the marine ecosystem; nearly a third of shark species assessed are at risk of extinction due to overfishing and bycatch. In 2006, recognizing the enormous environmental impact posed by hundreds of millions of enthusiastic consumers of shark fin, WildAid, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, began a prominent campaign to educate the Chinese public, blanketing state television and social media with public service announcements by Yao Ming, Jackie Chan, and Richard Branson. The goal: to make eating shark fin socially unacceptable.

“People say you can’t change China, but I would submit that no other society in the history of the world is changing as quickly as China is today,” said WildAid’s Peter Knights. It was possible to change public perception, he said, because the values of the new middle class were being created in real time. In Chinese culture, shark fin soup is about honoring your guest; WildAid posited that the answer lies, at least in part, in making your guest want something else. Behavioral scientists at Harvard have studied how drawing attention to what progressive neighbors are doing—curbing water consumption, using less electricity—changes perceptions about what is normal and thus influences how people act. It seems that when it comes to changing behavior, telling people what everyone else is doing is more effective than telling them what they should do.

The application of these principles by WildAid and other environmental groups does seem to have created a ripple, if not a wave, in Chinese consumption. It appears that, for the first time, overall shark fin demand in China has started to drop (and has not simply shifted around the country). Last summer, the Chinese government announced that it would stop serving shark fin soup at official state banquets. In response to the Shark Fin Initiative, launched by the Hong Kong branch of the World Wildlife Fund, more than a hundred and fifty large corporations, including HSBC, Credit Suisse, and Alibaba, took shark fin off the table at business functions, and more than a hundred hotels and restaurants now offer alternative, shark-free banquet menus. Thousands signed the WWF’s individual No Shark Fin Pledge. In September, Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific stopped carrying shark fin on its cargo flights. The Chinese media also jumped on the anti-shark-fin bandwagon: recent investigative reports by CCTV, China’s largest television network, reported that much of the shark fin served at top restaurants is fake, and that actual shark fin is full of mercury and devoid of nutritional value.

Other evidence also indicates that changes in the market are in fact occurring. Knights, of WildAid, said that traders have been cutting their prices by forty percent to shift inventory, and that multiple sources—fishermen in Indonesia, the Hong Kong shark fin trade merchants association, undercover agents in China—have reported a fifty to seventy percent decline in sales in 2012. “There is some change happening in the last eight or nine months, and it’s significant,” Knights said. When I requested the latest figures, the Census and Statistics Department told me that fin imports in the first quarter of 2013 are down forty percent from the first quarter of 2012 (using the newer coding categories). Clarke agrees that conservation awareness is part of the picture, but she believes the Chinese government’s recent austerity drive and a rumored internal crackdown on smuggling between October 2012 and March 2013 (which is encouraging in its own right) are also pushing down demand for shark fin.

Still, “reducing demand for fins and finning bans alone will not save sharks,” said Sonja Fordham, who led the efforts to establish the first U.S. and international bans on shark finning a decade ago. “There are so many other uses for sharks—meat, for example—depending on where you are in the world. Fishermen are always looking for new markets. If something takes off—like in Korea, which has a very strong market for skate wing—a species can be depleted so quickly. Education and advocacy are vital in Asia, but you also need to have sound regulations in the rest of the world.” At the same time, there is “no question that there has been a big change on how [the Chinese] view shark fin soup,” she added.

Beyond sharks, the potential to change consumption patterns of the Chinese middle class has earth-shaking implications for every conceivable commodity, from beef and cars to electricity and water. The fact that the Chinese government appears to be part of this shift may be the most encouraging sign of all. Any long-term solution to overfishing—or climate change or air pollution—is going to require progressive policies as well as progressive consumers.

The decline of shark fin soup is a lesson that there is an accounting for (lack of) taste after all, when it is shaped by a powerful social norm. So when young Chinese brides start to say no to the dish on their banquet menus, as they’re doing in Hong Kong, the rest of the world should take notice.